Inherit the Dead

would be the fool, the dupe, the guy who walked away with his tail between his legs.
    Window up, down, cold air, then heat, he couldn’t get it right. Couldn’t get any of it right, all the conflicting thoughts of this case buzzing in his brain.
    Did Angel need more than a couple of hundred million on top of whatever money she was already getting?
    Did Norman Loki?
    Julia had said her ex-husband was well taken care of, and it looked it. But who knew what sort of debt the man might have. He was a liar and a chameleon, a weed-smoking, aging hippie one minute, a vicious drunk the next.
    Perry tried to picture him pushing his ex-wife off the terrace, but the man didn’t seem brave enough.
    And what about Angel? Would her nanny really lie for her?
    Perry could see Athena Williams defending her charge to the death, but covering up a murder? Not that.
    So what was he missing?
    Window down again, another blast of night air needed to jog his addled sleep-deprived mind.
    He drove through Hauppauge, Patchogue, Nesconset—towns with Native American names that hadn’t seen an Indian for hundreds of years.
    He pictured the gold-framed photograph at the nanny’s home—the teenage girl with feet planted firmly on the floor, her cool blue eyes and defiant chin. A tough little girl. Not the trembling siren he’dheld in his arms, the gorgeous creature who made it impossible for him, for any man, to think straight.
    Perry stared into the dark road ahead. What was it she’d said that had lodged in his brain, something that had caught in the lower register of his psyche, something that had made him think she was lying? Know she was lying. What the hell was it?
    He tried to get at it, but all he could see was Julia Drusilla splayed on the sidewalk like a broken marionette and his last friend in the police department accusing him of reckless behavior.
    But it was there somewhere, a word or two buzzing in the back of his brain like a gnat.
    Perry turned off at the Manorville exit that would lead to the smaller roads connecting to the Hamptons. The moon was out, almost full, its silvery light illuminating the edges of the huge Stargazer sculpture on the deserted field by the side of the road. He knew it was supposed to be an abstract deer, but tonight it looked like something ferocious.
    It brought him back to another night in the Hamptons, a night with no moon, no stars. Just a madman he had tracked and almost killed. A madman who had almost killed him. Another missing-persons case, another young woman. One he had not been able to save.
    Like a phantom limb his side began to throb where the bullet had gone through flesh and muscle and the face of Derace McDonald was in his mind, a specter that never truly left him.
    He saw other faces, too—the girl’s parents, who had hired him to find their child when the police and FBI had failed. McDonald was locked away now, a mad lab rat for psychiatrists to study. But the girl Perry had been hired to find was dead. And despite the fact that the cards had been stacked against him, that the police and the FBI hadnot found the girl, it didn’t matter because she had died. In the end, he had failed and had almost died himself.
    The reason, Perry knew, that he had taken this case: to get it right this time. To save a girl. To save Angel. And he’d found her and she wasn’t dead. But still, his client had died, even though there was no madman like Derace McDonald coming after his client or after him.
    Or was there?
    Perry thumped his palm against the steering wheel, his adrenaline pumping, nerve ends tingling.
    Was it possible her father had set it all up, that right now he was arranging for Angel’s death so that he would inherit all of the money? No one had asked where the money went if both Angel and Julia were dead, and Norman Loki was the logical benefactor.
    Perry put more weight on the gas pedal, broke the speed limit on the quiet two-lane road through Water Mill, then Bridgehampton, then East Hampton.
    He pictured Norman at the station house, a protective arm around his daughter; then he pictured him so drunk he’d barely made sense. He saw Angel, too, tears in her eyes asking how her mother had died but not acting shocked when she’d gotten the answer.
    He drove through Amagansett, trying to remember the exact words that had made him doubt her, and for a split second he could hear her voice and what she said before it disappeared into a tangle of ganglia.
    Had he imagined